More than just a game

Among the many plangent platitudes that permeate the
vocabulary of the game, one ancient adage maintains that football builds
character; an alternate suggests that in fact it reveals character. The
sentimental sports movies, i.e., the majority, depend upon the first statement,
while the better ones naturally concentrate on the second, employing their
subject as a means to examine particular people, relationships, and the
meanings of the game they play.

Friday Night Lights, based on a highly regarded
book documenting the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas,
shows something of the significance of the sport in the context of small towns
and thwarted lives.

The picture establishes the visual context of its
action with the camera moving over the bleak brown spaces of West Texas,
pausing for an overhead view of a magnificent football stadium, glowing in
Astroturf green, while the soundtrack carries the voices of callers on a radio
sports show. They discuss the town's overwhelming concern, the upcoming season
and Odessa-Permian High School's chances to win a state championship.

They think it appropriate that tax money be spent on
the stadium rather than the school and that the coach earns a larger salary
than the principal. Football so obsesses the town (and countless others
throughout the West, the Midwest, and the South) that the citizens consider the
team and its players something like their own property, extensions of
themselves, a source of identity and pride, a heavy burden for the young men of
Odessa.

Just about all the townspeople participate
vicariously in the rhythms of the season, and they all of course know exactly
how to construct and coach a successful football team. They call the radio show
with helpful hints about strategy and the proper use of personnel, and a
committee of boosters visits the coach with advice about how to play defense.
When the Panthers win, they lavishly praise the coach and his players. When the
team loses, they decorate his front lawn with for-sale signs and call for his
head.

The coach and some of the players comprehend a
measure of the sad desperation behind the people's attitudes toward the game.
The athletes not only bring some secondhand glory to the citizens, they provide
an escape from the prison of their lives, a glimpse of something beyond the
drab reality of Odessa, Texas, where only the relentless oil pumps interrupt
the endless flatness stretching toward a distant horizon. Some of the players,
hoping for college scholarships, understand that football just might provide a
road out of the dreary place, a different life from the one they know.

The film concentrates on a few members of the team,
especially the star running back, Boobie Miles (Derek Luke) and the
quarterback, Mike Winchell (Lucas Black). It's a study in contrasts, since one
is a superbly gifted athlete overflowing with confidence and egoism, and the
other is an introverted, unhappy young man who never really enjoys the game.

Before a serious injury ruins Boobie's season, a
number of major college football powers court him. Mike, on the other hand,
only receives an expression of mild interest from that great center of learning
and football, Kansas Wesleyan, which still may offer some way out of Odessa.

Despite all the time spent on the players and the
games, the film really concentrates on the adults, in particular one player's
father (Tim McGraw) and the coach, Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton). An
obstreperous drunk who publicly embarrasses his son on the practice field, and
a typical washed-up high school athlete, McGraw sports a championship ring from
his days at Permian, clearly the last and only great moment of his life, when
he attained what Fitzgerald calls "an acute limited excellence."

More sensitive and thoughtful than any high school
coach I have ever had the misfortune to meet, Gaines, on the other hand,
realizes the essential meaninglessness of the whole endeavor, telling his
quarterback that there is very little difference between winning and losing,
but that it means more to the folks who watch the games than the players.

Whatever its ostensible subject and its numerous
moments of furious play, Friday Night
Lights merely uses football as medium and metaphor, a way of confronting
the paradoxical constriction of empty space and attenuated hope. It lacks the
ersatz uplift of the average sports movie, its halftime speeches sound false
and hollow, its victories fall short of the usual cinema triumphs.

The picture not only recalls those sports flicks
that transcend their subject, like Chariots
of Fire and Raging Bull, but
actually derives from quite different sources, studies in drab provincialism
like Winesburg, Ohio and another
movie about a defeated small town in Texas, The
Last Picture Show.